Local farms enter season amid labor worries

East End farms are entering the growing season under a cloud of uncertainty, as deportation fears among immigrant workers this year may further strain an already fragile farm labor picture.

“It’s a little too early to tell,” Long Island Farm Bureau executive director Bill Zalakar said when asked whether farms will face a labor shortage this season. “We’ll know more for sure in 30 days from now.”

Still, Zalakar said he expects labor to be “tight” this year and said agriculture remains heavily reliant on immigrant workers.

“The agriculture industry is so reliant on the immigrant workforce,” he said. “There are very few of the American people that will go out and do that labor-intensive work.”

For decades, a large swath of the farm worker labor pool has been undocumented. The share of hired crop farmworkers who were not legally authorized to work in the United States grew from roughly 14 % in 1989–91 to almost 55 percent in 1999–2001, then declined in recent years to about 42% in 2020–22, according to the USDA’s Economic Research Service.  

The situation is not new on the East End, where farm owners and operators have long complained about a tight labor market. Members of the Long Island Farm Bureau consistently brought the issue up at the bureau’s annual “breakfast with the congressman” meetings with former representatives Lee Zeldin and Tim Bishop.

Only a handful of local growers participate in the federal H-2A visa program, which allows U.S. employers to bring in temporary foreign agricultural workers when there are not enough domestic workers available. 

For years, farmers have complained about the cost and complexity of the H-2A program. Zalakar said the H-2A program is helpful but remains too burdensome for many growers, especially small farms. He said farmers often must plan a year in advance, pay increasing fees and hire an attorney to handle the paperwork.

“It just becomes another whole paperwork entity that costs them money and costs them time,” Zalakar said.

He said growers who use the program often bring back the same workers year after year and would like to see longer-term H-2A visas, rather than requiring farms and workers to go through the same process every season. 

The U.S. Department of Labor adopted a new rule last October that replaces the prior wage methodology with one based on occupational wage data, divides H-2A wages into two skill-based categories and adds a housing-related adjustment for H-2A workers who receive employer-provided housing.

Those changes to H-2A regulations move in the wrong direction, according to Juana Cortes de Torres, director of the Immigrant Legal Rights Project at Rural & Migrant Ministry.  The administration appears to be responding to a national farm labor shortage by lowering wages for H-2A workers rather than improving conditions, she said.

“When you look at the changes of the H-2A rules, what you see is a modification of the way in which wages are being calculated,” Cortes de Torres said. “That calculation results in lowering wages for the farmworker,” she said.

“If we think about shortages and the lowering of wages, those two things do not seem to correlate,” she said. “Are workers really going to come here [through the program] and get paid less?” Cortes de Torres asked. That’s no way to address a labor shortage, she said.

Cortes de Torres said the new rule has to be viewed alongside the current immigration climate. Immigration enforcement is already shrinking the available labor pool, she said. Workers are afraid, unsure of what’s going to happen.

Zalakar acknowledged widespread anxiety in immigrant communities, though he said he has not heard of immigration authorities conducting raids at Long Island farms.

“I don’t really know of any farms that they’ve stormed into and taken people at all,” he said. “They may have gotten people in the local communities or different things like that.”

That does not mean the fear is not real, or that farms are insulated from it.

Cortes de Torres said immigrants are facing a hostile environment not only in farming, but in other sectors that depend heavily on immigrant labor, including restaurants and construction. She said the broader question is whether the administration can simultaneously intensify immigration enforcement and expect a steady agricultural workforce to materialize through a lower-wage guest worker program.

Zalakar said the coming month should provide a better picture of whether East End farms are actually short on labor as the season ramps up.

Both he and Cortes de Torres agree on one basic point: local agriculture depends heavily on immigrant labor, and any disruption to that workforce carries consequences far beyond the farm field.